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It's a few minutes before lunchtime at Kasbah Tamadot in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, and Richard Branson is about to leap into a turquoise infinity pool, fully clothed. He curls his toes around the edge, counts to three and jumps--making sure to offer a huge grin and two thumbs-up signs--before plunging feet-first into the water.

"It's warmer than I expected!" he exclaims upon surfacing.

"Warmer than the Irish Sea?" I ask, referring to his 1987 dunking off the coast of Northern Ireland, shortly after he and Per Lindstrand became the first team to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. He chuckles and nods.

Branson has plenty of reason to be mirthful: He's on vacation at Kasbah Tamadot, his very own Moroccan hideaway. Behind him, a grand staircase leads to the sprawling adobe-colored main building where he's played host to many friends, including Mick Jagger, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel and any civilian willing to spend up to $3,000 per night for one of the compound's 27 rooms.

In front of him loom the snow-capped Atlas Mountains, providing a stark contrast from the sepia scrubland below--and a constant reminder of Branson's aerial adventures. Several years ago, he nearly plummeted to his death on those very peaks during an ill-fated balloon trip around the world launched from nearby Marrakech. As the cool night air replaced the Moroccan sunshine during Branson's first day afloat, the helium in his balloon contracted more rapidly than expected, sending the billionaire and two compatriots hurtling toward the Earth from 30,000 feet.

As they fired their burners in vain, plunging at a rate of 2,000 feet per minute, Branson considered leaping into the blackness and attempting to land via parachute. But the rocky, uninhabited ground rushing toward him offered scant chance of survival. So he and his crew tried to dump as much weight over the side as possible to slow their fall.

"We just started chucking everything we had out of the door," Branson recalls. "Suitcases, chairs, our clothes. And we had a bag full of money that we threw out. We did just manage to stop in time, so it was worth losing a bit of money on that occasion."

They were able to stabilize the balloon at 2,000 feet and stay afloat through the night, enduring a bumpy landing the following morning--in the middle of the Sahara. A squadron of heavily armed Algerian soldiers found Branson and his team and brought them to a local warlord.

"It was the most sort-of-luxurious kidnapping ever," Branson says. "[The warlord] would be roasting lambs and killing cattle. Day by day, we tried to make it clear that we would love to go home. Without sounding too discourteous, finally we managed to get word to the president of Algeria, who then sent a helicopter to rescue us."

Kasbah Tamadot is a 45-minute jeep ride from Marrakech (a quarter of an hour by helicopter, though Sir Richard prefers to travel by car). Upon my arrival on Easter Sunday, Branson was one of the first people I encountered. He broke into a big grin, waved me down a corridor and opened a door that led to an indoor pool. "Show him the sauna, will you?" he asked an attendant jauntily, before apologizing and rushing off to get some work done.

"I personally never work out of an office," he added. "So I always like to work out of beautiful places."

Tamadot certainly fits that description. Branson purchased the property in 1998 at the insistence of his parents, who were staying in the country to be with their son as he prepared for his around-the-world expedition. ("The best place in the world to launch balloons from is Morocco," he says. "The weather conditions are perfect, and the jet stream goes right over the top.") On a somewhat more casual ballooning trip of their own, they soared over what is now Kasbah Tamadot and immediately saw its potential.

After landing, the Bransons drove back to the old riad --a local variant on the mansion, built around an interior courtyard with fountains overlooked by terraces, this one originally lived in by a colonial French governor--and knocked on the front door. They found it was inhabited by antique dealer Luciano Tempo, who invited them in for a cup of coffee. When Branson returned from his trip, his parents approached him with an ultimatum.

"They came back and said to me that unless I bought it and turned it into the most beautiful hotel in the world, they would disown me," he says. "And, loving my parents, I decided that I'd better come up and have a look. And I, too, fell in love with it. That was one of the positive things that came out of my desire to push myself to the limits."

He paid about $1.5 million for the riad, receiving Tempo's warehouse of antiques in the nearby town of Asni as a bonus. "At that point, Tamadot was still a wonderful folly in the mountains, not yet the hotel it is today," says Branson's sister Vanessa.